Ooty

Udhagamandalam, universally Ooty, was a Toda grazing plateau until John Sullivan, collector of Coimbatore, bought land here in the 1820s and built a house; within a generation the British had made it the hot-weather capital of the Madras Presidency, complete with St Stephen's Church, whose roof beams were hauled up from Tipu Sultan's palace at Srirangapatna. The Nilgiris, the blue mountains, are a distinct massif where the Western and Eastern Ghats meet, and at 2,240 metres Ooty holds a chill that Tamils in the plains dream about. The classic arrival is the Nilgiri Mountain Railway, opened in 1899 and UNESCO-listed, a metre-gauge line that uses an Abt rack and pinion to climb from Mettupalayam to Coonoor at gradients as steep as one in twelve; the stretch on to Ooty is gentler and the whole run takes about five hours.

In town, the Government Botanical Garden of 1848 has a fossil tree some twenty million years old and a flower show each May; Doddabetta, 2,637 metres and the highest point in the Nilgiris, gives the range view. The better hours are outside town: tea estates and Sim's Park at Coonoor, the Dolphin's Nose viewpoint over the Catherine falls valley, shola-and-grassland walking at Avalanche, and the road past Pykara lake and its falls.